Today marked the debut of Blist as a publicly available product in beta, awaiting the testing and feedback of a broader audience. The company launched at the DEMO 2008 conference, and wrapped up a Series A round of venture capital financing to the tune of $6.5 million.

We interviewed Blist’s Mathew Johnson ahead of this newest phase in Blist’s existence. Among the features opening up, Blist added site search to help with finding existing databases their creators made available through sharing on the site.

Johnson said opening search for other documents and their authors will make it easier for people to build a Blist when they give it a try. He gave the example of the wine fan who wants to use Blist to organize a collection, and would like to see how another Blist-using oenophile did so.

“Specific applications aren’t as popular as spreadsheets,” Johnson said. “They need to be as easy for databases to catch on.”

Among their top use cases, Johnson said task list management has been popular with Blist’s users. Others, likely small business types, use Blist for tracking groups of people, such as sales leads for a company.

In its new feature set, Blist offers its Dashboard, which gives a snapshot of what is happening in the user’s network, and with the site’s community:

Permission-based controls allow creators to designate who can do what with their Blist:

Those who use productivity suites, notably Microsoft Office, likely tried turning their habit of creating Excel spreadsheets for various needs into Access databases. Even for someone who received instruction on working with Access, or similar desktop products, the learning curve has no barrier to keep people from careening over the edge.

People seeking inspiration from those publicly available databases created and shared in Blist may search for them to find ones that may help with a current project:

The service’s focus on making database creation and management a straightforward process built as an always available, rich Internet application suggests it can fill a niche. Demand will prove the depth of such a niche, but if it grabs enough people as regular users, look for the takeover rumors to get underway at some point soon thereafter.

The private beta of Blist kicks off on January 29th, as a first step in determining whether Merritt’s database service will find a niche among the online audience. He chatted with WebProNews ahead of the company’s debut during the DEMO conference in Palm Desert, California.

He cited how people start with a spreadsheet, usually Excel, in establishing a table of data. Over time, those tables grow, driving a need for a product to manage the data better.

Though Microsoft Access looks to be the likely upgrade path, and Microsoft would certainly hope so, Merritt said that migration gets complex. People give up and go back to Excel, no matter how clunky the tables and sheets become.

Merritt finds other solutions, like Dabble DB and Zoho, aimed at an audience of programmers and DBAs, people who don’t need a simpler approach to creating a database. List management products aren’t up to the challenge of complex data, either.

That brings us back to Blist, for which Merritt took us through a demonstration. Visually, Blist compares favorably with Buzzword, the online word processor Adobe purchased.

Merritt said Blist will help build a “community around data.” Blist has tools for creating and sharing data. Its tools include drag and drop datatypes, and enables people to have multiple entries per cell.

A neat visual query builder lets the user drag a column of a database to create a quick filter. The builder includes the ability to make and save nested queries. Someone can craft logic in short order with the tool.

That builder and other facets of Blist include visual hints to users, letting them know how they can interact with parts of Blist in certain contexts. Eventually, users will be able to widgetize what they create with the service and publish the data they placed in Blist.

Merritt said the Blist team has former Microsoft and Amazon.com people on board. We asked if something like database reporting tool Crystal Reports had some influence on Blist, but Merritt said they worked at making the service a unique product from the ground up.

Blist will start as a consumer version, with a premium edition for the SMB market planned for a later release.

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